Reclaiming History

by Vincent Bugliosi

  The father of Ruth’s husband, Michael, was a “notorious Trotskyite” (coincidentally the same wing of the Communist Party that most attracted Oswald), although Michael had little contact with him. Michael’s stepfather, Michael Young, was the inventor of the first commercially licensed helicopter, the Bell 47.1070

  Ruth Paine herself was a member of the American Civil Liberties Union and League of Women Voters in Dallas. She considered herself a pacifist and had been connected with the Central Committee for Conscientious Objectors.1071 Ruth was a graduate of Antioch College in Ohio, as was her brother, a doctor. She also had a sister living in Ohio. In early 1951 Ruth joined the Society of Friends, commonly known as Quakers, “tremendously excited,” she said, “by the idea of the ‘inner light’—the possibility of direct communication between God and man—and also by the Quaker concern for other people.” She met Michael at a folk dance in Germantown, Pennsylvania, in 1955. Michael had flunked out of Harvard and transferred to Swarthmore College, spending a year there majoring in physics before dropping out of college in 1951. They married at a Friends meeting in Media, Pennsylvania, in December of 1957 and moved to Irving, a suburb of Dallas, where they bought a house in 1959. They had two small children, Sylvia Lynn, three, and Christopher, two.1072 Although Michael and Ruth, each of serious personality and strong social conscience, were soul mates on political issues, both being very liberal, their marriage had already gone stale by the time Ruth met the Oswalds.1073

  In September 1962, Michael and Ruth separated, although Michael continued to support the family, came to dinner twice a week, entertained and enjoyed his children, and generally made himself handy when he was there, often working in his workshop in the garage. Although the Paines were planning to divorce, Ruth thought they went out to the movies more often than some of their married friends.1074 Ruth would later volunteer her view of the marriage to the Warren Commission: “Our marriage is marked both by mutual honesty that is exceptional and by a lack of overt or interior strife, except that it hasn’t quite come together as a mutual partnership. My mother recently said to me that ‘If you would just look only at what Michael does there’s nothing wrong with your marriage at all. It is just what he says,’ and I concur with her opinion on that, that he is so scrupulously honest with his own feelings.” While they lived together, Michael had been, Ruth thought, “insufficiently attentive” but “always kind and thoughtful.”1075*

  Ruth knew no one at Glover’s gathering but Glover himself, whom she had met in a madrigal (old English songs) singing group to which she and Michael belonged.1076 She was eager for an opportunity to talk with native Russian speakers, as she had been studying the language with a Russian tutor in Dallas, took summer courses in Russian in Pennsylvania and Vermont in 1957 and 1959, and enrolled in a Berlitz course in Russian in 1959. She hoped one day to become a teacher in Russian, and later that summer began tutoring one student.1077 At Glover’s home Ruth had little opportunity to speak with Marina, who spent the first half of the evening trying to get baby June to stop crying and go to sleep. The de Mohrenschildts had a few words of Russian with Marina in the kitchen, but they did not amount to much, and Ruth was too embarrassed by her own poor Russian to do much more than listen.1078 Ruth also heard Oswald holding forth on his experiences in the Soviet Union in the living room, enough to know he considered himself a Marxist and had thought—before going there—that the Soviet Union’s economic system was superior to that of the United States. He complained about censorship, mentioning a letter his brother Robert sent to him in the USSR with a clipping about his “defection” that he never received, probably, he believed, because the Soviet authorities intercepted it. Ruth was puzzled. “His discussion of the censorship made me feel that he wanted his listeners to know he was not blind to the defects of the Soviet system,” she told the Warren Commission. “I was left wondering which country he thought conducted itself better,” though he did indicate he did not like the capitalist system.

  The gathering broke up late, but not before Ruth, who had no idea of the turbulence in the Oswalds’ marriage at the time, asked Marina for her address. She wanted to visit Marina to speak Russian with her—the only speaker of contemporary Russian that Ruth had met—in the hope of improving her own language skills. She hoped that Marina was speaking an “educated” Russian, but she was not well enough versed in the language to know whether she was or not.1079

  The day after the affair at Everett Glover’s, Lee ordered Marina to cook red beans and rice for dinner and then went out for the whole day. It was a Saturday, and although he sometimes worked on Saturdays at Jaggers (taking another day off during the week) to get time-and-a-half pay, he did not work this Saturday. When he returned, he found that she had cooked the rice and beans in the same pot, which infuriated him—he wanted the beans cooked separately and poured over the rice. Tempers flared, Marina threw the dinner out, and again Lee struck her. After she threw a wooden box of jewelry at him, which hit him on the shoulder, he threw her on the bed and grabbed her throat. “I won’t let you out of this alive,” he said. Just then, Junie started crying, and Lee went to comfort her. Marina went into the bathroom, found a rope she used for hanging the baby’s diapers up to dry, tied it around her neck, and climbed onto the toilet seat. Lee caught her in time and hit her in the face, shouting, “Don’t ever do that again. Only the most terrible fools try that.”

  “I can’t go on this way, Alka,” she wailed. “I don’t want to go on living.”

  The crisis was followed by the ritual contrition—and a memorable night of sex—and the equally inescapable laying of the blame on Marina.

  “I’ll try and change if you’ll only help me,” he said.

  “But why, Alka, why do you do it?”

  “Because I love you. I can’t stand it when you make me mad.”1080

  The fighting in the Oswald apartment finally became intolerable for the other tenants in the building, and the owner, Mr. William Martin Jurek, told Lee he and his wife had to stop fighting or leave. Lee decided to leave.1081 He said nothing to Marina about Jurek but went out to look for another place. He spotted a “For Rent” sign on an upstairs apartment of a ramshackle, wooden, two-unit building, about a block and a half away, around a corner, at 214 West Neely Street. The rent was sixty dollars a month, eight dollars less than what he had been paying at Elsbeth Street. He presented the idea of the move to Marina as an improvement in their lives, and on March 3, 1963, the Oswalds piled their belongings on June’s stroller and walked them over in several trips to their new place. Marina liked it—it had a porch and seemed more suitable for the baby. As poor as it was, at least visitor Gary Taylor thought it an improvement over Elsbeth Street.1082

  About two weeks after their first meeting at Everett Glover’s, Ruth wrote to Marina and offered to visit. Marina wrote back to say that they had just moved to Neely Street and needed time to tidy up the new apartment, so Ruth should come in about a week. Ruth did, arriving in the midmorning after a thirty-five-to forty-minute drive from Irving. The two young mothers took their children to a nearby park. It was a warm Dallas day and Marina was grateful for the opportunity for one-year-old June to play with other small children (Christopher was two, and Sylvia Lynn three), which was rare, and for the chance to talk with another woman—Ruth felt her desperate need for friendship. Marina did most of the talking, in Russian, taking care to speak slowly and use small simple words, which Ruth understood easily.

  Ruth visited Marina again on March 20. At either their first meeting or the second one, Marina told Ruth of her pregnancy and asked Ruth not to mention it to the Russian community. Ruth really didn’t know anyone in that community but assured Marina that she wouldn’t say anything until Marina chose to make the news public. Marina asked Ruth about birth control too—the pregnancy had been a surprise and not entirely welcome. She would not consider an abortion, but she was interested in preventing further surprises. They also talked about Lee’s refusal to help Marina learn Engli
sh, which Ruth found inconsiderate, even cruel. Ruth hadn’t warmed to Lee when they met at Everett Glover’s, and nothing Marina told her made her feel better about him.1083

  Throughout this period, Lee was quite obviously proceeding with his plans to murder General Walker, aided by a curious feature of the new apartment: Off the living room was a sort of small storeroom, hardly larger than a double closet, which he immediately appropriated as his “study.” There he could compose the notebook with the information and photographs he would use in plotting the assassination of Walker. Oddly, the tiny room had two entrances, one through a door from the outside at the top of the stairs, another through a door in the living room. Both doors could be locked. He gave Marina strict instructions that he was not to be disturbed when he was in there “working,” and the door from the exterior enabled him to come and go without her knowing.1084*

  Meanwhile, General Walker was back in the news in Dallas. In a speech on his tour on March 5 in Savannah, Georgia, reported in the Dallas Times Herald, Walker said to a standing ovation, “I challenge the commander in chief of the United States of America to take one U.S. Army division, the 82nd Airborne Division at Ft. Bragg, North Carolina, properly supported and joined by Cubans who want to be free, and liquidate the scourge that has descended upon the island of Cuba.”1085

  On March 12, Oswald ordered a Mannlicher-Carcano carbine from Klein’s Sporting Goods, a mail-order house in Chicago, using the name “A. Hidell” in accord with the fake ID cards he had fabricated at Jaggers-Chiles-Stovall. He paid $21.45 for it, less than he had paid for the pistol for which he was still waiting.1086

  Two days before, on Sunday, March 10, Oswald had gone to General Walker’s home at 4011 Turtle Creek Boulevard and taken a series of photographs. Four of them survive, having been found in a cardboard box in Ruth Paine’s garage in Irving, Texas, by the Dallas Police Department on November 23, 1963.1087 One shows the alley behind Walker’s house,1088 two the back of the house itself,1089 and one more is of railroad tracks in a wooded area about half a mile away.1090 It may not have been his first such visit, but one of the photographs shows some construction work on a building located at 21 Turtle Creek Square in the background.1091 The FBI consulted the supervisor of the work and he determined that the building was in that state of completion on the weekend of March 9 and 10.1092 The time card at Jaggers showed that Lee worked too late at the photo lab on Saturday, March 9, to have taken the snapshots that day,1093 so almost for sure they were taken on March 10. When Marina saw the photographs in Lee’s office, she asked him, “What kind of photographs are these?” but she said that “he didn’t say anything to me.”1094

  Oswald would have had little fear of getting caught snooping around the general’s house on March 10 since, as indicated, Walker was off on his well-publicized sleeper-bus tour of twenty-six cities in seventeen states with evangelist Billy Hargis, one of the then-popular crusades against Communism. “Operation Midnight Ride,” as they dubbed it, started in Miami on February 27 and was scheduled to finish on April 3 in Los Angeles. It was well reported in the newspapers, so Oswald knew the general would not be in Dallas on March 10.1095

  What was Oswald’s plan? How did he think he was going to kill General Walker with his pistol—perhaps ring the doorbell, hope that Walker himself would answer, and shoot the man at point blank? What if someone else opened the door? No one can know what was in Oswald’s mind, but his photographic reconnaissance of the Walker home may have led him to a more practical idea. In any case, it was only two days later, March 12, that Oswald, as indicated, ordered the Mannlicher-Carcano carbine from Klein’s Sporting Goods store in Chicago.

  By coincidence, both weapons, pistol and carbine, were shipped to him on the same day a little over a week later, March 20.1096 Marina noticed the rifle several days later in Lee’s “office.” He later draped a coat over it for concealment.1097

  At the same time Oswald was laboring over his notebook and carrying out surveillance of General Walker, he had come to the attention of the FBI again. John Fain, the special agent in the Fort Worth bureau, had closed the case on Lee Oswald in September of 1962 and retired a couple of weeks later, right in the middle of the Cuban missile crisis. His caseload fell to Special Agent James P. Hosty Jr. in the Dallas office. In July 1962, Fain had asked Hosty to run over to the Immigration and Naturalization Service in Dallas to review Marina’s file and forward information to him in Fort Worth about it, which Hosty did. Hosty had just taken an in-service training course in Washington, D.C., on security and counterespionage cases, and it occurred to him that Marina, a recently arrived twenty-three-year-old Russian immigrant, fit the profile of a “sleeper” agent, one who might lie dormant for years and be activated only if the cold war boiled over and diplomatic communications were severed. Hosty even went to his superior and asked for permission to open a file on Marina as a potential espionage agent. That permission was denied on the grounds that new immigrants were always allowed a six-month period of grace before the FBI interviewed them, but he did allow Hosty to open a “pending inactive” file on Marina.

  In late February of 1963 that six-month period was well over, and Hosty had not forgotten about Marina. He activated her file and drove over to Fort Worth and talked with the Oswalds’ landlady at the Mercedes Street address, who told him that the Oswalds had moved and left no forwarding address. A couple of weeks later he checked with the INS and found that Marina had registered, as she was required to do, her new address at Elsbeth Street in Dallas. On March 11, the day after Lee’s photographic surveillance of Walker’s house, Hosty called on Mrs. Tobias, only to learn that the Oswalds had been thrown out of there because of their constant, noisy fighting. Mrs. Tobias gave Hosty the Oswald’s new address at 214 West Neely Street. In Hosty’s book and in his testimony before the Warren Commission, he said Mrs. Tobias only told him the Oswalds had moved nearby, but didn’t know where, and he got their address from the postal authorities. But in his first statement on the matter, his FBI report of September 10, 1963, he said he got the Oswalds’ address from Mrs. Tobias. Hosty checked the mailbox at the Neely address and found the name Oswald on it, but he decided to hold off awhile on interviewing Marina, given what he thought he knew about their recent marital difficulties—it was FBI practice to try to conduct interviews under tranquil circumstances.

  Hosty had to write a report on his efforts to locate Marina, and so he also reviewed Lee’s closed file. He discovered that the New York office of the FBI had noted the fact that Lee had taken out a subscription to the U.S. Communist Party newspaper, the Worker, in December. Hosty by now was definitely intrigued, and on March 31 he requested permission from Washington to reopen the file on Oswald.1098

  Meanwhile, the target of Hosty’s interest was sitting in his office closet writing out a document,1099 a political statement in the tradition of Hitler’s Mein Kampf in which he switches gears, for the first time, to a leadership role. He starts by denouncing the Communist Party of the United States. Calling Communism “that most sublime ideal,” he says, “There can be no sympathy for those who have turned the idea of communism into a vill [vile] curse to western man.” He turns on the Soviets, who have “committed crimes unsurpassed even by their early day capitalist counterparts, the imprisonment of their own peoples, with the mass extermination so typical of Stalin, and the individual surpresstion [suppression] and regimentation under Krushchev.” He then proposes the formation of a new party—and seems to be addressing a host of prospective followers: “In order to free the hesitating and justifiably uncertain, future activist for the work ahead we must remove that obstacle which has so efficiently retarded him, namely the devotion of Communist Party U.S.A., to the Soviet Union, Soviet Government, and Soviet Communist International Movement.” Then he gets to his apocalyptic vision: “It is readily foreseeable that a coming economic, political or military crisis, internal or external, will bring about the final destruction of the capitalist system, assuming this, we can see how p
reparation in a special party could safeguard an independent course of action after the debacle, an American course steadfastly opposed to intervention by outside, relatively stable foreign powers, no matter from where they come, but in particular, and if necessary, violently opposed to Soviet intervention.” He writes that “whereas our political enemies talk loudly now, they have no concept of what total crisis means.”

  Entertained by his apocalyptic dream, Oswald can afford a certain bemused tolerance of the United States: “We have no interest in violently opposeing the U. S. Government, why should we manifest opposition when there are far greater forces at work, to bring-about the fall of the United States Government, than we could ever Possibly muster.”

  “We,” he says rather grandly, invoking a nonexistent cadre of dedicated followers, “do not have any interest in directly assuming the head of Government in the event of such an all-finising crisis.” He recognizes that patience will be required: “These prefered tactics now, may prove to be too limited in the near future, they should not be confused with slowness, indesision or fear, only the intellectualy fearless could even be remotly attracted too our doctrine, and yet this doctrine requirers the utmost restraint, a state of being in itself majustic in power. This is stoicism.” To those for whom too much stoicism is cold comfort, he offers hope: “Armed Defenses of our ideals must be an accepted doctrine after the crisis, just as refrainting from any demonstrations of force must be our decision in the mean time.”